Working at last!!

The game I have been struggling to complete, my project for this class, is finally done. I sat and just banged on the computer most of the fall break, for over 8 hours a day until I got it done. I have packaged it up and sent it off to my partner, Dale Crossman, and he is having it installed on a friend's server, so he can get some students into the game by the end of the semester.

In the meantime, I have put my entire programming class through the Alice program, which was so helpful to my colleagues in learning how to program in object-oriented languages, and they are now (mostly) doing pretty well in Java.

All in all, I think I have made good use of the skills and techniques I learned in this class. I am looking forward to finishing it up and getting done with everything.

School has started

It seems odd that it has been almost a month since I've posted here, but everyone knows how it is starting school. I have 4 preps, three of which I've never taught before.

I am using the Alice program, which I learned in the project, to teach my Honors Computer Programming class.

Since the capstone event, I've worked on the Success World game for at least an hour a day and more on weekends. I was originally going to just do the game in classic ASP, since I know it so well, but for several technical reasons, that just wouldn't work for this game.

Instead, I have decided to re-do the game entirely in C#, because it has several features that work better for our purposes. Of course this means that we probably won't be able to launch the program when we originally planned, the middle of the first quarter. I hope that won't be a problem for my partner Dale Crossman, but software development is hard.

Last Day in the Morning Class

Today we learned about connecting Web Services with databases, which is a subject I am very interested in. Unfortunately, we didn't go into as much detail as I would have liked, even though I'm sure it was over the heads of most people. Dr. Chen also went over the pros and cons of Service-Oriented Architecture. I had most of it figured out already, but it was good to see that the proponents of the paradigm are dealing creatively with the critics.

I have been working on our poster for tomorrow's capstone event, and I haven't had the opportunity to do much programming on the game. I'm eager to get back to that and finish it up.

Coming Down to the Wire

Today is Wednesday, and the whole experience ends on Friday. The atmoshphere is one of panic, almost. Everyone seems to be anxious about the poster, but I'm cramming like crazy to get some of this game done. I'm building the splash page for the website now, and it's coming along, but I feel like I should be working on the programming instead.

In our morning class, we are covering how to create and manage Web services from C#, and esoteric stuff like form-based password validation. I have done a lot of that in the past, but the ASP.NET paradigm is different enough that I feel I really have a lot to learn still. I will get it all, because I know that I need to know this stuff, but I know a lot of my group-mates are really confused by it all.

Monday, July 16

Well, our final week is here and to tell the truth, it seems like a bit of a letdown. We are putting together the pieces of our robotics class, and building an application to get the robots to run through a maze, similar to the robotics competition. (I have posted a video of the competition on the wiki) Most of us got lost in the programming, but even those of us who kept up had our troubles today. For example, my program looks great, but there is something wrong with the differential drive, which doesn't let me move the robot. It can spin, but not drive straight forward. I know it isn't a problem with the connection, because it works for other programs, but not for the maze program. Oh, well... It will take some work to fix it.

Dr. Chen has started lecturing on some very esoteric stuff, including hardware-based service oriented computing, and I feel fairly safe in saying that nobody in the class understood it. We will go through this week getting the basics of deploying a web-based service, though, so that should be a bit more interesting.

Guest Lecturer Today

Today, in addition to our lecture from Dr. Chen, about Web services, we had a guest lecturer talking about real-time embedded computing applications. This was fascinating. Dr. Yann Lee talked about putting hardware and software into common devices, and what the implications are for technology and for society.

We talked about systems from Mars Pathfinder to jumbo jets to cars all the way down to toothbrushes, all of which contain embedded processors and software. The question is: how good is good enough? What kind of reliability is needed and how is it tested? It turns out the answers are not obvious. As an example, Dr. Lee asked which was more important to be reliable, the software in a commercial jetliner, or the software in your car? Most people would say it would be more important in the jet, but it turns out that the pilot is able to fly the jet even if the system fails. If a system fails in your car, say your Anti-Lock Braking System, you may not be able to recover.

We connected this to the Service Oriented Computing by exploring the aspect of individual configurations. For example, in a home, there may be a security system or a spa, or diiferent appliances, etc. There is no way to make a one-size-fits-all solution, so the highly configurable model of Service-Oriented Computing makes sense to enable the user to customize exactly what he needs for his own application.

Confusion with VPL

Everybody was confused about Visual Programming Language today! I have decades of experience with programming and I was confused. I really can't understand why everybody in the class says they like it better than C#; I was totally lost a few times, even though I understand the basic programming concepts.

We all got straightened out, eventually, though, and learned the way to wrap the VPL programs with an Activity, so we can modularize our programs. This is going to be necessary because it takes so much room on the screen to do just something simple that a complete program to control a robot would be so massive as to be completely unreadable.

We ended by programming a way to open and close the robots claws. Things are looking promising.

Web services, as seen by high school students

Today we had a treat: we got to sit in on a group of high school students who were also working on robotics. They had some instruction in creating an application to use Web services, and we followed along with that. They were a bit slow for me; I was going on ahead of them, but it was good to see the steps in using Web services.

Thanks for the invitation!

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Well, we are working on Visual Programming Language (VPL) and it's like taking a giant step backwards to old-time BASIC. Most of the group don't know the advantages of structured languages, so they like dragging the boxes onto the board and connecting them, but to those of us who have actually done real programming before, this is tedious and downright UGLY!! Maybe it is just a way to introduce the way we do things, but I doubt it.

Oh, Yeah!! We're doing robots!!

Yesterday, we all got robot kits, and most of us came to class today with completed robots. I'm sure we all looked like kids with new toys last night.

Today, we downloaded Robotics Studio from Microsoft, and we are starting to program the robots. More later....

Looking forward to tomorrow.

We continue to learn the basics of programming, and I continue to help out. We were supposed to get through arrays today, but everybody was stuck on the fundamentals of event handling, so we didn't get there yet. We won't go any deeper into structures than arrays.

Today we got ROBOTS!! We will put them together tonight, and tomorrow, hopefully, we will start connecting them to the programming.

Not too much to report today

We continued to go through the basics of programming in C# today. The problem for me is that they really are the basics.

C#, like Java, was derived from C++, which I have been using for many years. Aside from the occasional point which is somewhat different, everything we have gone over so far is extremely elementary, as befits a class that is geared to beginners.

I found one small point of interest in class today: there is an object called Convert, which handles all kinds of conversions from one data type to another. That is a bit different from the way conversions are handled in C/C++, but makes more sense from the object-oriented point of view.

I have pretty much found myself helping out my classmates with their programs, rather than writing my own.

Monday, 7/2

I have been wanting to learn to program in C# and we've finally started learning it. I'm excited about it.

Today we spent most of our group time working on our project. In my case, that was a game of WhackAMole, programmed in Alice. I had my part done, but spent most of the day working with my partners, who haven't had any programming experience. It's done, but I had to do most of it myself.

We're having fun now!

While everyone in the MSTF has been learning a lot, and doing some good work, I believe we in the Software Research team have been having the most FUN.

We're using a software package called Alice (after Alice Liddell, of Alice in Wonderland fame) that enables us to build 3-D graphics worlds which we can animate to tell stories or just build pretty pictures.

The intent, of course, is to teach the basics of object-oriented programming, and I can see just how Alice leads into it. I will definitely use Alice to introduce my students to programming in the fall.

If we didn't do anything else in the project, the whole thing would be worthwhile just for the past week.

First Day's Impressions

I was struck today by a couple of things: first that everyone seems to be in awe at the enthusiasm of their mentors not simply for their own subjects, but for all knowledge, and secondly that when we leave the environment of the University, it is much too easy to become complacent about our own enthusiasm for knowledge.

I know we have a lot of things to do in our classrooms, and our days are filled with the trivia of everyday life, so it is all too easy to just float along on the currents of happenstance, but I think it is a terrible pity if we lose the joy of discovery and accomplishment.